anti-Semitic Violence Research Articles

Catholic Political Mobilization and Antisemitic Violence in Fin de Siècle France: The Case of the Union Nationale

Previous articleNext article No AccessArticlesCatholic Political Mobilization and Antisemitic Violence in Fin de Siècle France: The Case of the Union Nationale*Vicki CaronVicki CaronCornell University Search for more articles by this author Cornell UniversityPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 81, Number 2June 2009 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/598923 Views: 263Total views on this site Citations: 6Citations are reported from Crossref © 2009 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Faith Hillis The “Franco-Russian Marseillaise”: International Exchange and the Making of Antiliberal Politics in Fin de Siècle France, The Journal of Modern History 89, no.11 (Mar 2017): 39–78.https://doi.org/10.1086/690124 Bibliografie, (Jan 2015): 519–602.https://doi.org/10.13109/9783666310232.519Fernando Bravo López The Genocidal Islamophobia of a Late Nineteenth-Century French Anti-Semite: D. Kimon and The Pathology of Islam, Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations 25, no.11 (Sep 2013): 101–116.https://doi.org/10.1080/09596410.2013.824171Robert A. Ventresca Review Essay War without End: The Popes and the Jews between Polemic and History, Harvard Theological Review 105, no.0404 (Nov 2012): 466–490.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0017816012000223Gearóid Barry Marc Sangnier and the Pacifist Conundrum, 1932–45, (Jan 2012): 175–201.https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230373334_9Paul Knepper Lombroso's Jewish identity and its implications for criminology, Australian & New Zealand Journal of Criminology 44, no.33 (Dec 2011): 355–369.https://doi.org/10.1177/0004865811419062

Un antisémitisme nouveau? The debate about a ‘new antisemitism’ in France

ABSTRACT Nowhere has the debate about a ‘new antisemitism’ been as fierce and relevant as in France. In recent years this country has witnessed high recorded levels of antisemitism, prompting many commentators to claim the existence of an anti-sémitisme nouveau. Something has indeed changed, at least in terms of the nature, frequency and perpetrators of antisemitic violence in France. Previously connected exclusively to the extreme right, it has now also become associated with a group that is itself a victim of discrimination: ethnic minority youths living in the poor suburbs (banlieues). Peace first discusses and explains the statistics produced by the French watchdog on racism and antisemitism as well as the effects of the Middle East conflict. He then traces the debate on this ‘new antisemitism’ in the French context, contrasting the views of the label's promoters and opponents. He argues that, while antisemitism has undoubtedly evolved, the ‘new’ label is effectively erroneous as it fuses supposedly leftist and ‘Muslim’ antisemitism into one entity when they are not necessarily linked. In addition, he offers vital clarification of the distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism along with suggestions for further research.

The continuities of German history: nation, religion, and race across the long nineteenth century

1. The vanishing point of German history 2. The mirror turn lamp: senses of the nation before nationalism 3. On catastrophic religious violence and the national belonging: the Thirty Years' War and the massacre of Jews in social memory 4. From play to act: anti-Semitic violence in German and European history during the long nineteenth century 5. Eliminationist racism 6. Afterword: where the Sonderweg debate left us.

Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas Between Revelation and Ethics (review)

Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas Between Revelation and Ethics, by Samuel Moyn. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. 268 pp. $29.95. Academic interest in the work of Emmanuel Levinas (1906-95), the Lithuanian-born philosopher who articulates as first philosophy, has reached a critical mass in the last several years. Samuel Moyn, Associate Professor of History at Columbia University, sounds a cautionary note to this wide-spread and often uncritical attitude by tracing the philosophical roots and historical progression of thought, its sources and influences, up until Totality and Infinity in 1961. Against the laudatory or even hagiographical interpretation of Levinas as the ethical philosopher par excellence, Moyn seeks to contextualize the development of thought by showing how it emerges out of specific historical situations and philosophical controversies. Moyn's itinerary begins with academic apprenticeship in the 1920s and early 1930s in the shadow of Husserl and particularly Heidegger, his philosophical development during the European conflict of World War II, and the consolidation of his thought in the post-war period. Central throughout Moyn's analysis is the legacy of Heidegger's turn toward National Socialism in 1933, and most crucially and perhaps controversially, Moyn argues that Levinas cannot be understood except as a secularization of a transconfessional, but originally Protestant, theology of encounter with the divine (p. 12). That protestant theology of encounter is found in the work of Jean Hering and Karl Barth, and Moyn argues that Levinas retrojected his creation [of the other] into the foundations of his own particular (p. 12). own faith is, of course, Judaism. Moyn's Origins of the Other follows a chronological outline along two parallel paths, one emphasizing philosphy and the other theology/ethics. Chapter One, True Bergsonianism: Beginnings of a Philosopher, begins with a brief biographical sketch designed to correct the view of Levinas as a talmudic scholar reacting to antisemitic violence from the outset of his life. point of Moyn's reconsideration of cultural and educational origins is to insist that tutn toward an intersubjective ethics of the other was an immediate product neither of his early religious education nor of his initial philosophical study. Chapter Two, The Controversy over Intersubjectivity, details Heidegger's critique of Husserl and then analyzes two of Heidegger's own students, Karl Lowith and Hanna Arendt, and their different appropriations of their teacher's thought. Chapter Three, and Crisis: Interruption of a Trajectory, focuses upon reaction to Heidegger's 1933 membership in the Nazi Party, for Heidegger's Nazism forced Levinas to seek a path different from Heidegger's.Totaliter Aliter: Revelation in Interwar Theology, Chapter 4, parallels the earlier chapters in that Moyn traces a path through the First Quest for the historical Jesus and early 20th century Protestant theology, primarily Rudolf Otto and Karl Barth, before turning to a fine, detailed re-reading of Franz Rosenzweig's 1935 Star of Redemption. next section, Chapter 5, Levinas's Discovery of the Other in the Making of French Existentialism, concentrates on Kierkegaard's reception in France and the impact of the Danish Christian existentialist's thought upon those in circle. In Chapter 6, The Ethical Turn: Philosophy and Judaism in the Cold Moyn attacks the idea that the Holocaust caused Levinas to consider the relation to the other as an ethical demand. Instead, Moyn claims that the Cold War, rather than World War II, is determinative for evolution into an ethical philosopher. Moyn is at his analytical best in detailing the intricate philosophical connections between Levinas and his influences, and he is at his argumentative best when he tackles detailed readings of texts, but despite Moyn's fulsome accounting of philosphical development, I am left with several reservations. …

Linking Legacies of Loss: Traumatic Histories and Cross-Cultural Empathy in Caryl Phillips’s Higher Ground and The Nature of Blood

The work of the British-Caribbean writer Caryl Phillips provides notable literary instantiation of Cathy Caruth's claim that itself may provide the very link between cultures (Trauma 11), claim that, though central to trauma theory's ethical agenda, is hardly borne out by the practice of the field, which is still largely Eurocentric. In his novels Higher Ground (1989) and The Nature of Blood (1997), Phillips excavates histories of both black and Jewish suffering: all of his protagonists struggle with traumatic memories of racist or anti-semitic violence and oppression. However, Phillips does not treat these individual histories in isolation but lets them address one another. As result, his work resonates with Caruth's understanding of history and trauma as inherently relational: history, like trauma, is never simply one's own.... [H]istory is precisely the way we are implicated in each other's traumas (Unclaimed 24). In this essay, I will probe the nature of this implication by focusing on the novels' management of concept that plays crucial role in much recent work on trauma and witnessing (e.g., LaCapra, Bennett, and Kaplan). Many theorists agree that an appropriate response to accounts of trauma must involve identification with the witness, but they also insist that this empathy must be checked. Dominick LaCapra has coined the term empathic (Writing 41) to denote the desired type of affective involvement, which he distinguishes from self-sufficient, projective or incorporative identification. Empathic unsettlement means feeling for another without losing sight of the distinction between one's own experience and the experience of the other: involves virtual not vicarious experience-that is to say, experience in which one puts oneself in the other's position without taking the place of--or speaking for-the other or becoming surrogate victim who appropriates the victim's voice or (History 135). Jill Bennett relates LaCapra's notion of unsettlement to Bertolt Brecht's critique of identification, and specifically of art that induces what Brecht termed crude empathy, that is, a feeling for another based on the assimilation of the other's experience to the (10). Bennett analyzes contemporary trauma art that in Brechtian fashion seeks to negotiate balance between encouraging audience identification and thwarting it through the deployment of strategies of estrangement. The connections engendered by these works are seen to combine affect with critical awareness, resulting in encounters of an expropriative kind in which the space between self and other is not eradicated but inhabited (105). I argue that Higher Ground and The Nature of Blood go some way toward redeeming the ethical promise of trauma studies by promoting such critical and self-reflexive empathy as conducive to the establishment of truly inclusive post-traumatic community marked by openness to and respect for otherness. I will proceed by briefly analyzing some of the textual strategies Phillips adopts for managing empathy--in the double sense of succeeding in eliciting an response and of controlling or limiting empathy. I will mainly focus on the latter aspect--the attempt to rein in empathy--as that part of the equation seems to me to have been relatively underexplored in the existing criticism. I want to start with quotation from survey article on Phillips's work up to Higher Ground that was published in World Literature Today in 1991. The authors of the article, Hasan Marhama and Charles Sarvan, conclude their detailed analysis of Higher Ground by praising the imaginative feat that Phillips performs in this, his then latest novel, which shift[s] from the days of slavery somewhere on the coast of black Africa to contemporary maximum-security prison cell in the United States and then to Polish Jewish woman suffering incomprehension, loneliness, and breakdown in Britain during World War II. …

Catholic Racism and Its Opponents

Previous articleNext article No AccessCatholic Racism and Its Opponents*John Connelly John ConnellyUniversity of California, Berkeley Search for more articles by this author University of California, BerkeleyPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 79, Number 4December 2007 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/521066 Views: 238Total views on this site Citations: 6Citations are reported from Crossref © 2007 by The University of Chicago.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Paul Kasun Educational Differences among Members of U.S. Catholic Religious Institutes: Evidence for Assessing Racial-Ethnic Perspectives on Racism, Pastoral Psychology 68, no.44 (Apr 2019): 407–420.https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-019-00869-2Derek Hastings Nation, Race, and Religious Identity in the Early Nazi Movement, Religions 9, no.1010 (Oct 2018): 303.https://doi.org/10.3390/rel9100303JAMES CHAPPEL Nuclear Families in a Nuclear Age: Theorising the Family in 1950s West Germany, Contemporary European History 26, no.11 (Nov 2016): 85–109.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0960777316000539Janek Wasserman Österreichische Aktion : Monarchism, Authoritarianism, and the Unity of the Austrian Conservative Ideological Field during the First Republic, Central European History 47, no.11 (May 2014): 76–104.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008938914000636By Vicki Caron Catholic Political Mobilization and Antisemitic Violence in Fin de Siècle France: The Case of the Union Nationale Caron, The Journal of Modern History 81, no.22 (Jul 2015): 294–346.https://doi.org/10.1086/598923Samuel Moyn Jacques Maritain, Christian New Order, and the Birth of Human Rights, SSRN Electronic Journal (Jan 2008).https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1134345

Anti-semitic violence as reenactment: An essay in cultural history

At the turn of the century, circa 1900, the art historian Aby Warburg became interested in the atavistic—how over long stretches of time the seemingly irrational persisted and reemerged in new forms in the modern era. Ritual murder accusations provided a prominent example, and these examples, the article argues, were at the heart of his own conception of cultural history. Using Warburg as a starting point, the article suggests that we have yet to develop a fully articulated cultural history of anti-Semitic violence, and that our explanations remain bound to immediate context and to contemporary politics. This is certainly the case with Shulamit Volkov's famous concept of ‘anti-Semitism as cultural code,’ which lacks sufficiently sharp tools to understand how the long history of anti-Semitism, entangled as it was in Christian – Jewish relations, continued to shape anti-Semitic violence in the late nineteenth century. J. L. Austin's theory of speech acts, by contrast, allows us to consider both the synchronic dimension of anti-Semitic violence, and its connection to the diachronic, or long-term. This approach also has important implications for our understanding of hate speech more generally.

Patterns of Violence: The Local Population and the Mass Murder of Jews in Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, July–August 1941

Recently, there has been growing interest among historians in the question of popular participation in the Holocaust of European Jews, particularly in the territories to the east of the Soviet Union's 1941 western border. (1) Many factors have contributed to this avalanche of high-quality scholarly texts, among them the opening of the archives after the fall of communism, the centrality of complicity in the mass murder of Jews of people of particular ethnic origin to the perception and self-perception of the respective nations, and the incessant public demand for works that deal with this kind of emotionally charged issues. While scholars research events that occurred in different places and under circumstances that were substantially different as well, they address number of problems that are to some extent similar, among them the role of traditional antisemitism in determining popular participation in the murder of Jews, the extent to which the experience of the Soviet occupation framed the perception of Jews as Communists and enemies of the local Gentiles, and finally the influence the Germans and their allies exerted on the locals' attitudes toward and treatment of Jews. One small book, Jan Gross's Neighbors, occupies an especially important place in this recent historiography. The book not only reconstructed one especially horrid episode of the mass murder of Jews, in which the participation of local Gentiles (Poles) was truly massive, but made, in manner which is both subtle and radical, number of general theoretical suggestions. Gross's rendering of the Jedwabne story as the one in which of the population of small East European town murdered the other half is predicated on his intimation that the killers were guided neither by Nazi occupiers' orders nor, really, by their own resentment against the Jews' supposedly treacherous behavior during the Soviet occupation (which, he insists, was not nearly as massive as Polish general public and even historians came to believe) but rather by the centuries-long antisemitic tradition in Poland. (2) While Gross does say that the Holocaust has to be accounted for as system which functioned according to the preconceived (though constantly evolving) plan, he expresses his doubts about the tendency in the scholarly literature to read Shoah as phenomenon rooted in modernity and invites us to see it as heterogeneous phenomenon, as a mosaic composed of discreet episodes, improvised by local decision-makers, and hinging on unforced behavior. (3) By invoking the imagery of the Henryk Sienkiewicz national saga of 17thcentury wars, Trilogy, from the pages of which the murderous peasant mobs appear as if by magic, he suggests that the motivations of killers should be sought not in the context of the multiple occupations of 1939-41 and the Nazis' racial war but in the longue duree of Polish and--more broadly--East European history. (4) The immediate debates over Jan Gross's book tended to focus on what actually happened in Jedwabne and the surrounding areas in July 1941, and among the many merits of such debates is that they helped clarify with exceptional precision the highly complex and volatile context in which the event took place. (5) But the book and the debates it provoked have wider implications for framing the research agenda on the motivation of local non-Nazi killers of Jews in other areas of the Soviet borderlands during World War II. This article locates itself within this context of scholarly preoccupations and self-consciously addresses the debates over Gross's book as especially relevant for the case it studies. The article seeks to establish patterns of popular antisemitic violence in the two eastern provinces of Romania, Bessarabia and Bukovina, in July and August 1941, and to explain its variations. (6) The tragedies in Bessarabia and northern Bukovina took place simultaneously with the Jedwabne slaughter, and the character of the place--the western Soviet borderland--was also comparable, though, of course, in this case the land at the border was Romania, not Poland. …

Hungary's Antisemitic Provinces: Violence and Ritual Murder in the 1880s

The subject of this article is the Tiszaeszlár blood libel, one of several sensational Jewish ritual murder cases to unfold in central and eastern Europe in the last decades of the nineteenth century. By focusing on a region far removed from Tiszaeszlár, the article underscores the rapidity with which antisemitic violence traversed Hungary in the early 1880s. In examining the causes, function, and impact of this violence, Robert Nemes demonstrates the centrality of the provinces for understanding the depth and dynamism of political antisemitism in Hungary. Nemes also argues that Tiszaeszlár acted as a formative political experience for many people in the provinces and explores the wider consequences of this event, both in the near and in the long term.

A POLITICAL THREAT MODEL OF INTERGROUP VIOLENCE: JEWS IN PRE?WORLD WAR II GERMANY

Research often links minority group size and economic conditions with levels of intergroup violence, in line with facets of group threat and structural theories of intergroup crime. Building on the group threat perspective, we investigate the political antecedents of intergroup violence. This work tests the theoretical premise that violence against minority groups increases with the strength of political parties associated with minority group interests, independent of group size and economic conditions. This model is tested empirically for the case of violence against Jews in pre–World War II Germany, where Jews constituted a small proportion of the German population but were often associated with the leadership of the political left. Findings suggest that the gross domestic product and Jewish population size did not have predicted effects on major violent incidents against Jews. It was in fact the rising strength of leftist political parties that ignited anti-Semitic violence. Other venues where this model could be applied are proposed, and the findings are discussed in the context of intergroup violence and theories emphasizing minority group threat.

William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice

ABSTRACT Lingering controversy about anti-Semitism has kept The Merchant of Venice off the screen. Michael Radford's 2004 film adaptation creates a critique of anti-Semitic violence revealingly at odds with the play's comic form. This review considers the challenge Shakespeare's art poses to the ethical imperatives of contemporary filmmaking.

New Perspectives on Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ: Review Essay

New Perspectives on Mel Gibson's of Christ: Review Essay Ann W. Astell Purdue University Mel Gibson's Bible: Religion, Popular Culture, and of Christ, edited by Timothy K. Beal and Tod Linafelt. Afterlives of Bible 1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 208 pp. 11 illustrations. Paperback edition, $16.00. Mel Gibson's Passion: Controversy, and Its Implications, edited by Zev Garber. Supplements in Jewish Studies 1. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2006. 192 pp. $14.95. A blockbuster in theaters, Mel Gibson's of Christ is also an academic phenomenon, in part because of well publicized (and now litigious) criticism of screenplay by biblical scholars, theologians, and historians of religion-a criticism that began months before film's release on Ash Wednesday, February 25, 2004. Since then at least seven volumes of scholarly essays concerning film have appeared-five of them published in 2004. This review addresses two most recent edited collections: Mel Gibson's edited by Timothy K. Beal and Tod Linafelt, and Mel Gibson's Passion, edited by Zev Garber. Both titles inaugurate a book series. Mel Gibson's is first volume in Shofar Supplements in Jewish Studies, a series dedicated to pedagogical materials, for which Zev Garber is general editor. Mel Gibson's Bible is first volume in 'Afterlives of Bible, a series devoted to studying the rich and complex histories of Jewish and Christian biblical literature (p. 4), for which Beal and Linafelt serve as general editors. Together they stand as notable, signatory works that set a model and pose an agenda for subsequent volumes in their respective series. Each volume has a three-part division and an impressive group of contributors. Mel Gibson's Bible begins with The as Interpretation, with essays by Jack Miles, George M. Smiga, Tod Linafelt, Vincent J. Miller, Bruce Chilton, John Dominic Crossan, Jane Schaberg, and Mark D. Jordan and Kent L. Brintnall-all of which analyze and interpret primarily in relation to its religious sources (p. 6). Part 2 focuses on ethical and theological implications of Passion's particular presentation of Christian Gospel (p. 6). Paula Fredriksen, Susannah Heschel, Richard L. Rubenstein, Margaret R. Miles, Mark Douglas, and Mark C. Taylor contribute essays to this section. Finally, Part 3 explores film as a popular cultural-religious phenomenon (p. 7) and includes reflections by Thomas J.J. Altizer, Amy Hollywood, William G. Little, Jose Marquez, Jody Enders, Robert M. Franklin, and Timothy K. Beal. Section 1 of Mel Gibson's Passion, entitled Reflections on Film, includes a miscellany of essays by Irving Greenberg (reprinted from Commonweal), Penny Wheeler, Yvonne Kozlovsky-Golan, Bruce Zuckerman, Klaus Hodl, and Richard Holdredge. Section 2 follows with essays focused on Scriptural Jesus and Gibson's Passion by Peter Haas, Zev Garber, Gordon D. Young, S. Scott Bartchy (reprinted from Pastoral Psychology), Louis H. Feldman, and Jacob Neusner. In third section, nine authors-Gordon R. Mork, Samuel Edelman and Carol Edelman, John T. Pawlikowski, Richard Libowitz, James F. Moore, Steven Leonard Jacobs, Stuart D. Robertson, and Joseph A. Edelheit-comment on film from perspective of Diversity and Dialogue. Mel Gibson's includes a useful bibliography and an index. Advance reviews of of Christ stirred fear that film would intensify prejudice against Jews, blamed historically as Christ-killers, and actually incite antisemitic violence. Two years after its release, contributors to these volumes must honestly admit that no such fall-out resulted. In fact, according to a national poll of 1,003 adults conducted by Gary Tobin (cited in essay by Edelman and Edelman in MGP, p. …

The anti-Jewish pogrom in Eastern Thrace in 1934: new evidence for the responsibility of the Turkish government

ABSTRACT In the summer of 1934 Eastern Thrace was shaken by a wave of antisemitic violence that ended as suddenly as it had begun. The reasons underlying this attack on the Jewish minority are still not well understood, mainly due to the lack of definitive Turkish sources. New evidence indicates that İbrahim Tali, the representative of the Turkish government in Thrace and the district of Çanakkale further south, played a crucial role. The incidents should be understood in light of Turkish–Italian tensions in the spring of 1934, and the strategic need for re-arming the demilitarized zones in Thrace and at the Straits.

The Jewish Community of Salonica under Siege: The Antisemitic Violence of the Summer of 1931

The antisemitic violence that took place in Salonica during the summer of 1931 constituted a defining moment not just for the city’s Jewish community and relations between Jewish and non-Jewish Greeks, but also for the development of Greek nationalism. After the Greek military defeat of 1922 and the conclusion of the Lausanne Treaty of 1923, Salonica had become a battleground for the reconfiguration of Greek national identity. It was there that the problems of territorial insecurities, the influx of refugees from Anatolia, struggles between various ethnic, religious, and cultural groups, and the wider battle between Venizelism and its opponents played out. Antisemitism proved successful when it could be effectively aligned with these primary causes of social, political, and economic anxiety. Moreover, antisemitic movements in other European countries (primarily Hungary and Romania) set a precedent for the hyper-nationalist, anti-communist, and intensely xenophobic discourse of the period. But Greece was out of step with much of the rest of Europe in that 1931 represented the peak of antisemitic momentum in that country and not a step on the path to further escalation.

Deicide Deja Vu: Mel Gibson's Film, The Passion--An Attack on 40 Years of Jewish-Christian Dialogue

It is now four decades after Nostra Aerate and a few years after both A Sacred Obligation: Rethinking Christian Faith in Relation to Judaism and the Jewish People and Dabru Emet: A Jewish Statement on Christians and Christianity. In addition, the Scholar's Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches has for than 30 years now been a positive force for Jewish Christian dialogues in both North America and Europe. results of these documents and dialogues have been far reaching, even in to the parish and local church level. In a modest way they have had an impact on the liturgy of some churches. There has even been a shift in the rhetoric of some in the Christian fundamentalist community regarding Jews, Judaism, Israel and the Shoah. Would all of this progress in Christian Jewish dialogue be wiped away with one video representation of the death of Jesus? Would the film resurrect the ancient accusation of deicide against the Jews? Would it be the precursor of a new era of Christian religious anti-Judaism akin to that already existing in the Moslem world? These are critical questions that must be addressed in any discussion of Mel Gibson's Passion. To paraphrase Paul Newman's famous line from Cool Hand Luke, What we have here is a failure of interpretation! Mel Gibson's is a film based on a personal interpretation of the Gospel story of the last hours of Jesus. That specific interpretation is part idiosyncratic to Mel Gibson and to the brand of Catholicism he and his father and others express that denies the changes in Catholic theology and liturgy generated out of Vatican I and II. That interpretation is also colored by the very anti-Jewish novel of the erstwhile nun, Anne Catherine Emmerich, who wrote Dolorous of Our Lord Jesus Christ in the early 1800's. (In what must be the height of bad taste, bad timing, and obvious pandering to the right wing of the Catholic Church, the Church leadership has begun the process of beatifying Emroerich as the first step towards sainthood.) Gibson has said in numerous interviews that he is simply being faithful to the Gospels themselves. This is hardly true. Any rendition of the Gospel story which condenses all four works into one cannot by definition be true to the Gospel story. But Gibson also adds many images to the story not contained in the Gospels. Executive Director of Boston Colleges Center for Christian Jewish Learning, Phillip Cunningham's brilliant analysis of the film, Gibson's of the Christ: A Challenge to Catholic Teaching, gives evidence of this in a most graphic way. Cunningham points out the numerous non-biblical references contained in the film, primarily drawn from the demented ravings of Emmerich. Gibson's artistic license, in part drawn from Emmerich, raises the level of anti-Jewish images well beyond those in the Gospels themselves and gives rise to the accusation of antisemitism, which Gibson denies. However, it is not the intent of this paper to recount those anti-Jewish aspects of the film, but rather this paper will focus on the impact of the film on Christian-Jewish dialogue. In a survey done of viewers of the film, pollster Gary Tobin reported that the film did not have the negative impact Jewish groups predicted. As reported in the JTA on March 17(th) 2004, ...a random national survey of 1,003 adults conducted by Tobin's group March 5-9, nearly two weeks after the movies premiere, 12 percent of the 146 people who had seen The Passion said it made them less likely to blame Jews today for the crucifixion, compared to 5 percent who said they were more likely to blame all Jews for killing Jesus. Was Gibson correct that the film was not antisemitic? Were Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant groups crying wolf? doomsday predictions of immediate increased anti-Jewish attitudes and antisemitic violence never happened. Gibson was not correct; religious groups were not crying wolf. …

Le recul de l'État fort et la nouvelle mobilisation antisémite dans la France contemporaine

The author of this article explores the causes of the aggravation of anti-Semitic violence in France, a country where — despite outbreaks of nationalist fever such as the Dreyfus affair — the Jewish community has invented for itself a model of a Diaspora living in complete integration in a nation state characterized by a universalist ideology. A central hypothesis is put forward. The encouragement of« communitarian construction from the bottom and from the top » by public authorities over the past 20 years has impacted Jewish society, forcing it increasingly to conceive of itself as an organized community among others. In this context, the logics of collective negotiation and confrontation with other communities have replaced the traditional vertical links between individuals and the state.

Marauding Youth and the Christian Front: Antisemitic Violence in Boston and New York During World War II

American Jewish History 91.2 (2003) 233-267 [Access article in PDF] Marauding Youth and the Christian Front: Antisemitic Violence in Boston and New York During World War II Stephen H. Norwood In October 1943 , the New York newspaper PM declared that bands of Irish Catholic youths, inspired by the Coughlinite Christian Front, had for over a year waged an "organized campaign of terrorism" against Jews in Boston's Dorchester district and in neighboring Roxbury and Mattapan. They had violently assaulted Jews in the streets and parks, often inflicting serious injuries with blackjacks and brass knuckles, and had desecrated synagogues and vandalized Jewish stores and homes. The New York Post stated that the "beatings of Jews" in Boston were "an almost daily occurrence." State Senator Maurice Goldman, representing 100 ,000 Jews, residing mostly in Dorchester, Roxbury, and Mattapan, joined by four state representatives from those areas, declared to Governor Leverett Saltonstall that their constituents were living "in mortal fear." Many Jews could not leave their homes, even in daylight, frightened of being beaten by youths from adjacent Irish Catholic neighborhoods like South Boston, Fields Corner, and the Codman Square area, who deliberately entered Dorchester, Roxbury, and Mattapan to go "Jew hunting." The New York Yiddish daily The Day called the antisemitic violence that had occurred in Dorchester during the previous year "a series of small pogroms."1 Neither Boston's police nor its Catholic clergy made any serious effort to discourage the antisemitic violence. Jewish victims of the attacks had repeatedly complained about them, "only to be insulted and beaten again by the police themselves." One Jewish leader in Dorchester stated that the Boston police, largely Irish American, not only took no action to prevent antisemitic violence, but "would just as soon encourage it." The Christian Front, during the middle of World War II, distributed inflammatory antisemitic literature throughout Boston, "without the slightest interference by the police." Frances Sweeney, a prominent Boston Irish Catholic anti-fascist, denounced both city and state authorities and [End Page 233] Boston's Catholic Church at all levels for their lack of concern about the antisemitic outbreaks: "The attacks on Jew[s] . . . are the complete responsibility of Governor Saltonstall, Mayor [Maurice] Tobin, the [Catholic] church, and the clergy-all of whom . . . ignored this tragedy."2 The PM articles, written by Arnold Beichman, drew on documents supplied by the American Jewish Congress (AJ Congress), the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), and the Dorchester Record, as well as by Frances Sweeney. Dr. Samuel Margoshes, editor of The Day, declared that he had carefully reviewed the sworn affidavits of fifty Dorchester Jews—men, women, and children—who reported that they had been attacked on the streets. He had also spoken personally to several of the victims. Margoshes concluded that the affidavits, collected by the Boston AJ Congress, verified that PM was "one hundred per cent right."3 There were far more Jewish victims of beatings and vandalism than these affidavits revealed, but many feared retaliation if they made a public complaint. PM published sixteen of the signed affidavits from Dorchester, Mattapan, and Roxbury over two days, a random sample which revealed that many Jewish children and adults had sustained serious injuries in the attacks.4 Arthur Derounian, one of the nation's leading authorities on hate groups, an Armenian American who wrote under the pseudonym John Roy Carlson, reported in the New York Post that he had visited Jewish victims in Boston and received their signed complaints of antisemitic assaults and property damage. He interviewed sixty-nine-year-old Samuel Rudofsky, bed-ridden after youths blackjacked him from behind, and [End Page 234] noted his blood-stained garments and numerous head stitches. Rudofsky told Carlson that, in his eighteen years residing in Dorchester, he had never seen anything as frightening as the current antisemitic violence. Many of the affidavits were signed by Jewish teenagers who had been surrounded by gangs of youths, who hurled antisemitic epithets and badly beat them. Carlson referred to one that detailed the breaking...

No Way Out: The Politics of Polish Jewry 1935-1939 (review)

No Way Out: The Politics of Polish Jewry 1935-1939, by Emanuel MelzerThe history of Jews in Poland between the two World Wars is generally depressing, and the period 1935-1939 is particularly depressing. Emanuel Melzer's study documents this unenviable picture with fresh research from Israeli, Polish, and British archives as well as published primary and secondary literature. His work fleshes out the familiar topic and gives fresh detail about the issues of the day. He discusses Polish government policy, shows the reactions of different Polish groups, and examines the activities of Jewish parties and factions. The book makes a useful contribution to the field, although it could have been more sharply focused.Melzer confirms that antisemitism, which was a problem throughout the interwar period, radicalized and deepened after 1935. The National Democratic movement had long made antisemitism a major plank in its program, but their major opponent, Jozef Pilsudski, the dominant figure in Poland in 1926-35, adopted a more equitable policy towards Jews and other minorities. After his death in 1935, Pilsudski's successors, the Colonels, attempted to bolster their political position by borrowing the opposition's antisemitic policy. They encouraged boycotts of large and small Jewish enterprises, tolerated anti-Jewish bullying in schools and universities, enacted laws restricting kosher slaughter, and made Jewish emigration a major aim of foreign policy. The Colonels disliked antisemitic violence, but they did little to stop it, and Polish Jews suffered several severe pogroms at this time as well as numerous lesser incidents. Melzer shows that large segments of society pushed the Polish government to adopt these policies. Students were most vehement and active, while peasants tended to be passive and disliked strident anti-Jewish policies that interfered with their trading patterns. Factory workers included both antisemites and proponents of Polish-Jewish solidarity. Melzer's portrait of Polish society and government policies shows the range of opinion. However, he puts more emphasis on the antisemitic side of that spectrum.Melzer traces the variety of Jewish political parties and factions from the religious conservatives on the right to the Bund, Labor Zionists, and Communists on the left. His major point is that there was little cooperation among the parties to fight off antisemitic initiatives from government and society. Not only did each party have its own approach, it actively competed with other Jewish parties for support among the Jewish public and failed to present a united front against Polish antisemitic elements. …

TheOrganización Israelita Argentina: Between Perón and The Jews

AbstractHaving endured a wave of anti-Semitic violence which lasted from 1943 until late 1947, Argentina's Jewish community confronted a greater challenge in Juan Peron's politics. This article finds that Peron did not, however, attempt to control the community: the Organizacion Israelita Argentina (OIA), a Jewish Peronist organization, functioned primarily to demonstrate public harmony between Peron and the Jews. While the evidence does indicate overwhelming Jewish mistrust of Peron, community leaders, as embodied by the Delegacion de Asociaciones Israelitas Argentinas (DAIA), achieved a positive relationship with the president. Although the DALA may have thereby protected the community, its failure to represent majority Jewish opinion underscored a weakness in the organization's structure.

Les juifs d'état dans les guerres franco-françaises. Du boulangisme au front populaire

State Jews in Franco-French wars. From Boulangism to the Popular Front, Pierre Birnbaum. The Franco-French war mechanism, i.e. the intense radicalization of political conflict, includes antisemitism as one of its major elements. At such times, " state Jews ", those directly involved in the civic debates and belonging to the circles of power, attract a major part of the passions and hatreds that rent the social body. Alfred Naquet, who attempted the impossible wager of being both Jewish and Boulangiste ; Joseph Reinach, who polarized the antisemitic violence of the Dreyfus affair ; Léon Blum, the first Jewish President of the Council of Ministers : these three emblematic figures illus- trate, in different ways, the central place which antisemitism occupied in the political culture of the adversaries of the model embodied by the Third Republic.